It's Baton Rouge: Out to Lunch

Laura Nichols never expected aesthetics to become her career.

Originally from Lake Charles, Laura came to Baton Rouge to attend LSU and then spent the next decade working as an emergency room nurse before returning to school to become a nurse practitioner.

Her first job as a nurse practitioner required a lengthy commute and 12-hour shifts, an arrangement Laura quickly realized wasn’t sustainable as a single mother with two ch...

It's no secret that Amazon and e-commerce in general has been eating retial stores' lunch. You've probably thought to yourself one time this week already - "Do I really have to go to a store to buy that? Couldn't I just order it online?"

Well, yes, of course, you can order just about everything online, but it's just not the same as going into a store. Is it?

So, if we agree on that, what exactly is the difference? All things being ...

The media industry is having a rough decade. Newspapers are closing and local TV stations are being consolidated by distant owners. The advertising dollars that used to fund local journalism have mostly migrated to platforms that have no particular interest in what’s happening in your neighborhood.

But, along with a number of other trends you can probably name, Baton Rouge isn’t following the rules.

Brandon Foreman is C...

When was the last time you started a new job? Do you remember what the onboarding was like? The paperwork, the benefits forms, the direct deposit setup, the login credentials that didn’t work yet? 

Today there’s a whole industry built around making that whole process way less painful — and my first guest today runs one of those companies, right here in Baton Rouge.

Craig Broome is a Baton Rouge native who tho...

Here’s a number that I keep coming back to. American restaurants throw away somewhere between 22 and 33 billion pounds of food every year. To put a price tag on it, that’s about $162 billion in food costs that just disappear. That’s before the restaurant makes a single dime.

I’ve been thinking about that number since I started putting today’s show together, because both of my guests have something to s...

Miranda Albarez hosts this edition of Out to Lunch.

If there’s one thing that has consistently evolved as society has progressed over the millennia, it’s the speed we do things. Every year, people’s patience grows thinner and attention spans, smaller. And with the invention of these tiny computers that we keep in our pockets 24/7, we no longer take in life without first viewing it through the screen.

Most of us ha...

There’s a particular kind of business story that you can really only tell about Louisiana. It usually starts with somebody who barely had two nickels to rub together, an idea that almost nobody else took seriously, and a lot of stubbornness.

It almost never starts in a glass tower in a major metropolis. It starts in places like a front yard near LSU. Or in a small office somewhere on the way to the oil patch.

Both of my lunch...

How many companies do you think are involved in building a single house? Take a guess. Five? Ten? Maybe twenty?

Fifty-three.

On average, fifty-three different companies touch a single home before anyone moves in — foundation crews, electricians, plumbers, pest control, lighting specialists, insurers. 

Karen Profita represents all of them. She runs the Home Builders Association of Greater Baton Rouge, the largest homebuil...

In Hollywood, power couples from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, icons like  Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, exemplified glamour both on and off the screen. At the pinnacle of their careers, these romantic couples were closely followed and adored by movie-goers, capturing the public’s imagination during a Golden Age of film. 

Today, power couples are...

There’s a line I keep hearing from people who run small businesses in Baton Rouge. It goes something like: I didn’t plan this. I was doing something else, I saw a gap, and I walked through it.

Norisha Kirts Glover has a degree in mass communication and an MPA. She spent years in nonprofit fundraising in Washington, D.C. and California. In 2015 she walked through a door marked “commercial construction” &mdash...

Think about the last time you showed your ID. Maybe at the airport, maybe at a bar, maybe somewhere you had to prove you were who you said you were. You pulled out a card. A piece of plastic. Maybe it was a little beat up. Maybe the photo was from ten years ago.

There’s a decent chance that if you live in Louisiana, you’ve also used a phone to do that. That digital driver’s license on your phone — that was b...

I’m Amy Irvin, host of Out to Lunch in Baton Rouge. I was a college student once. A long time ago. And like a lot of college students, I picked some of my classes based on the professor. Word of mouth, mostly. What my friends said. Whether the 8 a.m. course section was worth getting out of bed for or not.

These days, there’s a website that tries to do that systematically. You’ve probably heard of it. Rate My Profe...

Think about the last time you visited a city you’d never been to before. Not for business — just to go. What made you decide to stay somewhere? What made you feel like the place wanted you there?

Most of the time, we don’t give a lot of credit to the people who set that stage. The campground owner who keeps a shuttle running at midnight so you can get back safely from the French Quarter. The art curator who figure...

Today’s edition of Out to Lunch sits at the intersection of two big ideas: immersion and reach.  One guest is building virtual worlds for the world’s largest energy companies and the U.S. Air Force — right here in Baton Rouge. The other is shaping how millions of people around the globe experience the NFL — from a home office in Baton Rouge. 

Both guests grew up in Louisiana, both left, both came b...

A little wartime history: In 1940, at the start of World War II, approximately 12 million women were working outside the household in the United States, comprising about 25% of the female population. That number rose significantly during the war to over 18 million by 1945, as the U.S. government encouraged women in posters and commercial advertising to volunteer for wartime service in factories. Inspired by a song by Redd Evans and...

If you listen to this show you’ve heard at the end of every episode the credits “today’s show was engineered by J T O’Neal” and “photos were taken by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez.” But do you know what that actually means? What is an audio engineer? What do photographers actually do that’s different from what you do with your phone?

On today's Out to Lunch we turn the mics on our prod...

The disco era of the Seventies is characterized by a danceable "four-on-the-floor" beat, lush orchestration, synthesizers, and glamorous fashion, ultimately exploding into mainstream pop culture with hits, iconic clubs like Studio 54, and films like Saturday Night Fever, before fading by 1980.

Filmed in 1977, Saturday Night Fever was a critical and commercial success, helping to popularize disco around the world. The soundtrack, fe...

Louisiana cuisine is famous for its bold, flavorful dishes like gumbo, jambalaya, and crawfish étouffée. Stemming from rich French, Spanish, African, and Native American influences, our world famous fare is illuminated primarily through Cajun and Creole traditions, using local seafood, smoked meats, rice, and spices for iconic meals.

Take my favorite Louisiana dish, gumbo, for instance. There are certain ingredients, flavors, and t...

Each year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office grants hundreds of thousands of patents to people who embody what we sometimes refer to as “American ingenuity”. These are folks who are creative problem-solvers, capable of out-of-the box thinking that leads to innovation.  

From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, American ingenuity has resulted in a host of innovations and inventions that most of us now take for gran...